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The Progressive Tense: Frequency of Its Use in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leah Dennis
Leah Dennis*
Affiliation:
Alabama College
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Extract

The present study is an attempt to examine the growth of use of the progressive, or expanded, tense system in Modern English. The shades of significance of the system have been minutely analyzed by Jespersen, Curme, and others. Jespersen's explanation of the form as taking its rise in the preposition on + the gerund after the verb to be (fused with the use of be + the ing participle) seems unchallenged. But the frequency of use is yet another matter.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 1940 , pp. 855 - 865
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part IV (Heidelberg, 1931), pp. 164–234; George O. Curme, A Grammar of the English Language (Heath), iii (1931), 373–385; ii (1935), 205–207, 220–222; C. R. Goedsche, “The Terminate Aspects of the Expanded Form,” J. E. G. P., xxxi (1932), 469–477; and earlier studies referred to in the above.

2 Op. cit., pp. 164–177.—The on + the gerund theory had been given earlier in Jespersen's Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905), p. 205.

3 O. F. Emerson, The History of the English Language (1926), p. 386.

4 “Ah, haue ye ben learning of mo messages …” and “… he hath somewhat to dooing Which followeth the trace of one that is wooing.” Is to dooing a preposition and gerund where we would use an infinitive, or is it an elliptical progressive infinitive? Since I did not know I did not count it. (It is the most irregular form I encountered.) Progressive forms in the two plays are not infrequent.

5 P. 168.

6 P. 177.

7 The style of a translation is by no means always formalized and hampered by the language of the original. One of the most genuinely vital colloquial styles of its day appeared in an anonymous prose translation of Phormio of 1734. Naturally I cared little about the date of the original or the accuracy of the translation; it was the language of the translator that mattered.

8 Thus Shakespeare was employed for prose and poetic drama, and for poetry (in two units); Milton for poetry, informational prose, and drama (in two units); Dryden in all the fields except prose fiction; and so on.

9 A few times the passage turned out to be unusably dialectal and had to be abandoned. It was my struggle dodging Irish dialect in James Nelson Barker that called my attention to the wide use of progressives in the Irish idiom.

10 For example, “my cottage was neat, my cattle thriving” (Noah, She Would Be a Soldier, 1819), decided as adjective. Interesting, wanting (“lacking”), and owing I usually felt as adjectives.

11 I considered using for early prose drama some of the didactic material in dialogue, examples of which are fairly numerous, but I decided that that progressive education of the moment was for the most part about as genuinely colloquial as it was enticing.

12 Of the progressive form of have, which Jespersen says belongs to the nineteenth century, my selections show 3 examples: Dickens (1849), Pinero (1899), and Crothers (1921).

13 “Tiriel,” written 1789°. Many present-day rhetoricians would grumble at the ellipsis of the line as ungrammatical: “But now his eyes were dark'n'd & his wife fading in death.”

14 John Davies, 1654, “while Supper was preparing”; Congreve, 1692, “extraordinary Preparations had been making for some time past”; Sterne, 1760, “suspicion … of what was carrying on”; Randolph, 1806, “whilst their fleeces were taking off”; James Nelson Barker, 1808, “perhaps at this moment the ceremony is performing” (these two American); and Dickens, 1849, “when money was owing him.” In the last, owing might be construed as an adjective. This counting does not include such uses as “The carriage was driving up” which are equally employed today—at least with a change of vehicle.

15 Albert C. Baugh, History of the English Language, (1935), p. 363.